Pleat Is Coming Soon, and I'm Unreasonably Excited About Quoting Software

I Need to Tell You About Something

I spent six years managing a soft treatments workroom in Pompano Beach. And in those six years, I probably spent more time quoting than sewing.

That's not an exaggeration. I'd get home at 7pm after a full day of fabrication, eat something questionable standing over the sink, and then open my laptop to build quotes until my eyes crossed. The spreadsheet I used had been passed down from the previous manager like some kind of cursed heirloom. It had tabs referencing other tabs referencing a tab I was genuinely afraid to click on.

It worked. Mostly. Until I forgot to update a lining surcharge and sent out three weeks of quotes at the old rate. That was a fun month.

The spreadsheet didn't cost me a subscription fee. It cost me three weeks of underpriced quotes.

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So What Is Pleat?

Pleat is a quoting platform built from the ground up for custom window treatment workrooms. Not adapted from generic invoicing software. Not a spreadsheet with a nice skin on it. A real tool that understands what a workroom actually does: treatment types, fabric calculations, labor pricing, hardware, lining, the whole thing.

You put in the specs. You get an accurate quote. You send it to your designer or client looking like a professional, not like someone who just exported a Google Sheet to PDF at midnight.

That's the short version.

Why It Exists

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start your workroom: quoting is the job.

The sewing, the fabrication, the installs? That's the part you love. That's the part you're good at. But if your quotes are wrong, none of it matters. You're just donating your labor to someone's living room renovation.

If your quotes are wrong, none of it matters. You're just donating your labor.

And the tools most workrooms use to quote? They're either spreadsheets held together with duct tape and prayer, or they're generic business software that doesn't know the difference between a euro pleat and a pinch pleat. Neither option is great when you're trying to price a 14-window project with three different treatment types, COM fabric, and a designer who keeps changing the header style.

I've watched workroom owners, smart and talented people who can build a flawless motorized drapery from scratch, lose money because their quoting process was a mess. Not because they didn't know their costs. Because the system they were using couldn't keep up.

That's why Pleat exists.

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My Part in This

I left the workroom. That sentence still feels weird to type.

I didn't leave because I stopped loving the work. I left because I realized the thing I was best at wasn't sewing. It was the business side. The quoting, the client communication, the systems. And I kept thinking: why is this so hard? Why are we all reinventing the same broken wheel?

When I found the team building Pleat, it felt like someone had finally decided to solve the problem I'd been complaining about for years. They needed someone who actually understood workroom operations. Someone who had re-quoted a 22-window project at 11pm because a designer added blackout lining to every room. That someone was me, apparently.

Now I do content and community for Pleat, which is a fancy way of saying I write about the stuff I wish someone had told me when I was running the shop.

What's Coming

We're not quite ready to launch yet, but we're close. Really close.

Pleat is going to handle the quoting workflow from start to finish. Treatment configuration, accurate pricing, professional quote output, and the kind of organization that means you never have to dig through your email to find out what fabric was spec'd for the Miller project.

I don't want to oversell it. It's a quoting tool, not a miracle. You still have to know your costs, understand your margins, and run your business. But the mechanical part, the part where you're punching numbers into cells and hoping you didn't break a formula? That part gets a lot better.

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Get on the Waitlist

If any of this resonates, if you've ever sent a quote and then immediately opened it again to make sure the numbers were right, go to usepleat.com and join the waitlist.

We're letting people in soon, and early access folks will get to shape what this thing becomes. Your feedback, your frustrations, your "why doesn't it do this." That's what makes it a real workroom tool and not just another piece of software built by people who've never touched a sewing machine.

I'm biased, obviously. But I'm also someone who has manually calculated yardage for a seven-window great room at 1am. So when I say I'm excited about quoting software, I mean it in the most deeply personal, slightly unhinged way possible.

More soon. I promise.